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  • The National Closet:Gay Israel in Yossi and Jagger
  • Raz Yosef (bio)

Love should never be a secret": this is the tagline in the advertising campaign for Eytan Fox's award-winning Israeli gay film, Yossi and Jagger (2002) (fig. 1). The film narrates the story of forbidden love between two Israeli army officers—Yossi (Ohad Knoller) and Lior (Yehuda Levi), better known by his nickname, Jagger—who serve on a snowy base on the Israeli-Lebanese border. The lovers' homosexuality ultimately remains secret. Jagger, who tries throughout the film to persuade Yossi to express their love publicly, dies in battle—a moment too late to hear Yossi say, "I love you." The only other person present at this tragic moment is another officer, Ofir (Assi Cohen), who is much more likely to interpret Yossi's confession as an expression of love between brothers-in-arms than as an expression of romantic attachment, especially since he thinks that Jagger has been having an affair with Yaeli (Aya Koren), a female soldier with whom he himself is in love. Also, in Jagger's parents' house during the Shiva (the weeklong Jewish mourning period), Yossi cannot declare his love, the love that dares not speak its name. While Yaeli, who was in love with Jagger, lies to his mother by telling her that they were having a romantic relationship, the only thing that Yossi can say to his lover's bereaved mother is that Jagger loved the song "Your Soul," by the famous Israeli singer Rita. Thus Yossi can share his secret with the film's viewers alone, the only witnesses, apart from the gay protagonists, of course, who know throughout the film about the queer affair. Homosexuality, therefore, remains at the level of cinematic narrative, trapped in the closet, buried in the coffin with Jagger's mutilated body.

"The closet," claims Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "is the defining structure of gay oppression in the present [i.e., the twentieth] century."1 In explaining the [End Page 283]


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Figure 1.

"Love should never be a secret"—a gay love story of two Israeli army officers, Jagger (Yehuda Levi), right, and Yossi (Ohad Knoller), in Yossi and Jagger. Photograph courtesy of Lama Productions

dynamics that construct the closet, Sedgwick identifies two contradictory views of homosexuality in Western society. The minoritizing view suggests that only certain people are homosexuals, and so the definition of homosexuality is important only for those who are interested in adopting a gay identity. The universalizing view claims that homosexuality is only one part of a general phenomenon of intimacy between people of the same sex that everyone can experience, and does not belong to a singular and distinct minority group. According to this view, homosexuality signifies sexuality in general and defines heterosexuality through a homo/heterosexuality binary that informs our entire culture. These two views exist simultaneously, constructing an incoherent definition of homosexuality in modern culture, and this incoherence explains the workings of the closet and the forces through which it is regulated. As Sedgwick argues, the closet enables the denial of the incoherence between "real" homosexuality and a more fluid formulation that recognizes homosexuality as a structural element in heterosexual identity. Heterosexuality needs knowledge about homosexuality to construct its own definition, but it must also disavow this knowledge—it must convince itself that it does not know what it does not want to know, even though it knows it all along—for fear of the dangerous proximity between heterosexuality and homosexuality, which is [End Page 284] supervised by policing the knowledge of the closet. The closet, therefore, is a transit point between revelation and concealment, between knowledge and ignorance, in which homosexuality is constructed as an "open secret."

In this article I critically discuss the mechanism of the closet and the ways in which it disciplines and controls gay male subjectivity in Yossi and Jagger. The sexual politics of the film must be understood in the Israeli homo-lesbian cultural context in which the film was made. The end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s signify a time of growth in Israeli gay and lesbian consciousness, growth related to...

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